Sunday, August 7, 2011

Epilepsy and seizures are still mysterious to us

Before I start get into today's subject I wish to qualify myself by saying I am not a neurologist or a neurosurgeon. I have suffered through seizures and I have studied neuronets from a programers point of view.

I was talking to a friend about their cat that has recently started having seizures. This lead to a conversation about seizures and epilepsy, in both humans and other animals, and the causes. First we talked about seizures and came up with many reasons for them. We then went into what is epilepsy but had a hard time actually defining it other than to say it is brain related. It was the question about what is the difference between seizures and epilepsy that inspired me to wright this post.

I know the explanation I about to give is overly simplifying a major problem. There is much about the brain that we don't know. One thing we do know is the brain is the most sophisticated computer in the world and that is why computer scientist have tried so hard to duplicate it. A seizure is a short in that computer that could be caused by a number of things, such as, being dropped and knocking something loose, a wire that wasn't secured and is touching another wire, a virus or just a part wearing out. Many times it is something that can be corrected once the cause is found.

Epilepsy on the other hand is more of a permanent state that can't be totally corrected and a short might just be one of many symptoms.  You can repair the shorts, take care of the viruses with your anti-virus software and do any other maintenance to the point the systems runs well, maybe not like it use to, but you still have the major cause that gave you the problems in the first place.

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